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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksSbb9AfqSs
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I would think that like many true stories it will make good TV.
I recently watched the story on a Robbie Coltrane true crime documentary.
Gavin and Stacey actor Steffan Rhodri is starring alongside Philip Glenister in a new BBC factual drama which is based on a series of real-life murders in Wales that were solved 30 years later using new DNA techniques.
Steeltown Murders is set in both 1973 and the early 2000s and follows two detectives on the hunt to catch the killer of three young women in the Port Talbot area.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/bbc-steeltown-murders-first-look-at-crime-drama-based-on-real-life-port-talbot-case/ar-AA19JRbR
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/steeltown-murders-true-story-joseph-kappen-bbc-132057083.html
Coincidentally I watched a documentary on the story a couple of months ago.
I just had a look and its still available at Sky On Demand.
It features the real Paul Bethany.
You can find it on Robbie Coltranes Critical Evidence, series 2 episode episode 6.
The title is The Saturday Night Strangler.
Its on the Crime+Investigation channel.
I suppose the tools they have today makes these old investigations look very amateurish.
I dont think the drama focused on the blunders made by the police, unlike the documentary, which seemed quite honest.
The documentary only covers the cold case investigation that took place almost 30 years after the original.
At the time of the murders they were building the M4, this attracted hundreds of construction workers from all over the country, ships were arriving and leaving daily at Swansea docks, Port Talbot Steelworks, and an Oil Refinery close by, and there was a general consensus amongst the police that the culprit was not a local man.
There was no DNA in 1973.
There were two cases that included 3 murdered girls, although the original investigation failed to link the two cases, and two separate investigations were conducted.
This is despite the fact that there many similarities between both cases, and therefore a huge blunder.
At the first murder scene, which was Sandra Newton, the only evidence was a tyre mark nearby.
Her boyfriend became a suspect, despite the fact that he couldnt drive, and didnt own a car.
The other 2 murders occurred 6 weeks later.
As a result Sandra Newton became the forgotten victim.
There were 150 detectives, and thousands of PCs involved in the original investigation.
They interviewed 35,000 people.
A reliable witness came forward, who saw the girls getting into a white Austin 1100,
The Austin 1100 pulled up next to the witness at a set of traffic lights, and he was able to describe the driver.
They taped the seats of 10,000 cars, hoping to find fibres from one of the girls coats.
Although some cars werent taped if the drivers said they werent driving on the night of the murder.
Another one?
The actual culprit was interviewed.
He claimed that he had stayed in on the night of the murders, and that his car had been up on bricks.
He matched the description, looked the spitting image of the photofit, and owned the right car.
His wife backed up his story, and the police accepted her word.
They didnt check the car story with any neighbours
In the drama it showed officers taping his car.
I dont know if this bit is accurate.
Although they obviously didnt get a result from the tapings.
Not being a forensic scientist, I wouldnt have a clue if there was any value in continuing to tape car seats months, and years later.
How many times would you have to wash and hoover car seats to completely get rid of any fibres?
By late 1974, there were 30,000 index cards in the system, 11,500 light coloured vehicle details, 5,500 statements, and 10,000 suspects in the file.
The investigation was going nowhere, and it was left to one or two officers.
It ground to a halt in 1975.
Sandra Newtons was stopped in 1974.
They were able to extract DNA from the girls underwear in 1998.
They got the DNA of the killer in 2000.
There was no match on the database.
The investigation was reopened, with a low budget.
Paul Bethel asked for a team of 12 officers, and got 3.
Paul Bethel said that he started the cold case investigation by locking the others in a room for six months.
Their plan was to reduce the 30,000 people on the card index down to 500, and they would DNA test the 500.
I am not sure there was anything scientific about this, but that was the plan, and it took 8 months not 6.
One of them had to find them all, and get DNA samples off them.
Not easy, as all they had were their 1973 addresses.
After 4 months he had eliminated 199.
The culprit was number 200 on the list.
He had been interviewed in 1973, but was eliminated.
On this occasion he was put to one side, as he happened to be dead.
In 2001 the cases were linked by the DNA samples.
So whoever killed Sandra Newton definitely killed the other 2 girls.
Still no match on the data base.
So they did a familial search, and found the culprits son.
They dug the culprit up in 2002.
The end.
The drama highlighted the agony the parents and families of the victims went through.
There were other victims, like the boyfriend of Sandra Newton, and the stepfather of one of the other girls.
They spent most of their lives suspected of the murders.
This must have been very difficult in a small community.
Then there was the culprits wife, who backed up his story about the car, and gave him an alibi.
I dont believe she would have had any choice.
I feel sorry for her, and the miserable life she must have led, married to him.
After the event they found a record of him being stopped by the police, when his car was meant to have been up on bricks.
Another one?
In addition to this when they dug him up, they noted that his shoe size was 9, the same size as the shoe print left at the second murder scene.
So nearly thirty years before they were aware that he matched the witness description, owned the right car, had the right shoe size, was a spit of the photofit, and his car was not up on bricks.
The police have represented this case as ground breaking.
Not sure I would agree.
It's a shame the guy died before he could be convicted, but the power of DNA is really something.
One other programme I like is Air Crash Investigation. The report always identifies the failings, then tells the viewer how thos failings have led to greater safety measures in the future. As somebody that used to be a nervous flier, I found ACI reassuring.
Firstly they didnt connect the three cases, despite the similarities, and the fact that the crime scenes were fairly close together, all the girls were of a similar age.
Of course the biggest factor in this is the the team investigating the Sandra Newton murder appear to have made their minds up that the boyfriend was to blame.
This is despite the fact that that the only evidence was a tyre track, and the boyfriend couldnt drive and didnt own a car,
The officer in change of the second murders refused to entertain any thoughts that the crimes could possibly have been connected.
In addition they had a similar victim that was raped, but not murdered.
She wasnt linked until the cold case investigation.
Again there were similarities.
She did a photofit which was the spitting image of Kappen.
The photofit was of a man with bushy hair and a moustache, which matched the description of the witness that saw him picking up the girls that were murdered later.
Despite having interviewing him in 1973, they hadnt realised that his shoe size matched the shoe print at the second crime scene.
Their failure to even check whether or not he had been stopped during the time that he claimed that his car was off the road was a huge blunder.
And their failure to check with his neighbours whether his car was up on bricks, or not, was another one.
I really cant accept that it was like the proverbial needle in a haystack.
How could it be when he matched the description given by the reliable witness that saw the girls getting in the car, matched the photofit exactly, drove the correct car, had the correct shoe size, and they accepted his alibi that was only backed up by his wife, and not questioned.
He fitted exactly every bit of evidence that they had
They didnt attempt to get a DNA sample in 1973 because of this alibi.
How much more evidence would you need?
The biggest blunder was not connecting the cases.
When did detectives link the murders?
There were so many areas where the killer could have come from.
Working without computers, police faced an impossible task as they sifted through a huge pool of possible suspects from a mountain of paperwork.
Officers, at the time, considered that the same person had killed all three girls - but someone was already in the frame for Sandra's murder.
The prime suspect for Sandra's death was the last person who saw her. That was her boyfriend, but he maintained his innocence and was never charged.
Despite the brutal similarities, detectives continued to run separate inquiries into Sandra's death and the murders of Geraldine and Pauline - until almost 30 years later.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65556974.amp
Murder of Maureen Mulcahy
It is not known if Kappen ever killed again after September 1973, but he remains a suspect in the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy, aged 23, in February 1976.[17][8][11] Mulcahy was similarly strangled after a Saturday night out, being found dead the following morning in wasteland very close to the Sandfields estate, where "Saturday Night Strangler" Kappen was living at the time.[17] Witness testimony points to Kappen having abducted her in a manner similar to the 1973 murders.[17] As soon as Kappen had been identified in the 1973 cases, detectives announced their intention to speak to Mulcahy's family.[8]
In Mulcahy's case, there was no available DNA evidence in 2002 to examine or potentially link to Kappen and thus police were unable to prove or disprove his involvement.[17] However, forensic expert Dr. Colin Dark told a BBC programme about the unsolved case in 2020 that there would now be opportunities to look for DNA if the police examined the existing material, pointing out that Kappen had a very rare element of DNA that would allow him to be implicated or eliminated from the case possibly even with only a partial DNA profile from the remaining physical evidence, which the police have still kept.[17] He also observed that police still have tapings from Mulcahy's body and clothing at the time taken to search for fibres, and these could now be examined for DNA if the police chose to.[1
Kappen has also been suspected of having committed numerous other unsolved rapes.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kappen
The hunt for the Saturday Night Strangler
It was a retired Port Talbot detective, Elwyn Wheadon, who had given Kappen's name to the original murder team. "Kappen was a bouncer in nightclubs," says Wheadon. He was a man of violent disposition, a Fagin-like character who sought out boys and girls to commit crimes on his behalf. I first met him at a youth club where he threw a boy down some stairs. There were no injuries, but you felt Kappen was capable of anything and I knew he had an Austin 1100."
"I thought it was natural for men to hit women," Christine continues. "I thought all men were violent. He used to rape me every two weeks. It was against my will. I never wanted it. Joe would say, 'Come on, come on', and then he would insist on his conjugal rights."
Following Wheadon's tip, detectives from the murder team visited Kappen on October 13 1973, nearly a month after the murders; but he swiftly passed through the system. In his statement Kappen claimed to have returned from Neath Fair at around 9.30pm on the Saturday and spent the rest of the evening "looking after my canaries until about 10.45pm, when myself and my wife went to bed. I got up the next morning at 10.30am." Christine, sitting on the sofa beside him, had concurred. "I alibied him but I always did whenever the police came knocking. You learned to do it without thinking. 'On such and such a night he was with me, officer.' I couldn't see him doing that. I cannot imagine him doing that to a child. I never saw any signs of an unusual interest in young girls."
In fact, Kappen regularly pursued teenage girls. His job as a bouncer brought him into contact with the younger generation. "It was his thrill to go with younger girls even when he was 43," says Rees. "If he had a girl he paraded her around for show, to show his mates. In bed it was always regular sex, no violence, nothing out of the ordinary."
When he worked as a driver on local buses, Kappen would use his rest breaks on the village green at Llandarcy to try to chat up girls. "He was a sexual predator," says Bethell. "He always carried a weapon, a knife, and he had the ligature ready at Llandarcy. With him there is always predatory intent combined with arrogance. He was cocky, confident, not afraid to carry out crimes in his own back yard where the risk of being identified was always high."
Even in the first killing, Kappen made little attempt to hide Sandra's body. If he had carried it deeper into the culvert, instead of dumping it at the entrance, her corpse might not have been found for weeks. Kappen's record of assaults on women, all unknown to police at the time, began in the early 1960s. In 1964 he attacked a 15-year-old schoolgirl as they were walking together in the Sandfields estate. As they entered a half-built house, he threw her to the ground and jumped on her. But when the girl screamed he got up and ran away.
And there were other incidents. In February 1973, a man resembling Kappen, in an Austin, picked up two female hitchhikers near Neath. As they neared their drop-off point, he drove past and took them to an isolated road. One girl was in the front and the other in the back seat. The attacker stopped the car and told them, "I know you want it." He then grabbed the girl in the front seat and started pawing her breasts. Her companion reached forward to intervene, but he swung back his fist and punched her in the face. Both girls were screaming and tried to escape, but found the car doors would not open from the inside. Fortunately, the girl in the back had long nails and was able to grab the stub of the door lock and pull it up. The door opened and she pulled open the front passenger door from the outside. Woken by the commotion, the occupants of a nearby house turned on their lights and the attacker fled. The double attempted rape was never reported because one of the girls thought she'd get in trouble with her father, a churchwarden. The attacker was almost certainly Kappen. His next victim, Sandra Newton, would not escape alive.
There were some oversights. The most glaring was a small but telling inconsistency in Kappen's story. When detectives first turned up at his home, his Austin 1100 was on blocks with the wheels removed, probably because Kappen was trying to switch tyres after newspapers reports that the police had a cast of the killer's tyre track from the Llandarcy murder scene. Kappen told the detectives he had put the car on blocks the day after the murders. However, in police log books of random stop and check operations in the week after the killing, Kappen and his car were logged as being on the road. No one in the police team made the connection. Without computerised cross-referencing, Kappen's lie went unnoticed.
"There have to be other rapes or unsolved murders that could be attributed to him." Kappen's picture has been circulated to every police force in Britain, and every six weeks his DNA profile is run against any new cold cases on NDNAD. The hunt for other victims is still going on.
The decades-long trail for the Saturday Night Strangler that began on a sweaty 1970s disco dance floor ended on a green Welsh hillside and a grassy tomb. In life he escaped the law. But deep into his death Joseph Kappen, father, husband, petty thief, and serial killer, was finally unmasked.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/jan/18/weekend.kevintoolis
When did detectives link the murders?
There were so many areas where the killer could have come from.
Working without computers, police faced an impossible task as they sifted through a huge pool of possible suspects from a mountain of paperwork.
Officers, at the time, considered that the same person had killed all three girls - but someone was already in the frame for Sandra's murder.
The prime suspect for Sandra's death was the last person who saw her. That was her boyfriend, but he maintained his innocence and was never charged.
Despite the brutal similarities, detectives continued to run separate inquiries into Sandra's death and the murders of Geraldine and Pauline - until almost 30 years later.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65556974.amp
Murder of Maureen Mulcahy
It is not known if Kappen ever killed again after September 1973, but he remains a suspect in the unsolved murder of Maureen Mulcahy, aged 23, in February 1976.[17][8][11] Mulcahy was similarly strangled after a Saturday night out, being found dead the following morning in wasteland very close to the Sandfields estate, where "Saturday Night Strangler" Kappen was living at the time.[17] Witness testimony points to Kappen having abducted her in a manner similar to the 1973 murders.[17] As soon as Kappen had been identified in the 1973 cases, detectives announced their intention to speak to Mulcahy's family.[8]
In Mulcahy's case, there was no available DNA evidence in 2002 to examine or potentially link to Kappen and thus police were unable to prove or disprove his involvement.[17] However, forensic expert Dr. Colin Dark told a BBC programme about the unsolved case in 2020 that there would now be opportunities to look for DNA if the police examined the existing material, pointing out that Kappen had a very rare element of DNA that would allow him to be implicated or eliminated from the case possibly even with only a partial DNA profile from the remaining physical evidence, which the police have still kept.[17] He also observed that police still have tapings from Mulcahy's body and clothing at the time taken to search for fibres, and these could now be examined for DNA if the police chose to.[1
Kappen has also been suspected of having committed numerous other unsolved rapes.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kappen
The hunt for the Saturday Night Strangler
Kevin Toolis' story of the unmasking of Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd's murderer concludes.
Click here for part one
It was a retired Port Talbot detective, Elwyn Wheadon, who had given Kappen's name to the original murder team. "Kappen was a bouncer in nightclubs," says Wheadon. He was a man of violent disposition, a Fagin-like character who sought out boys and girls to commit crimes on his behalf. I first met him at a youth club where he threw a boy down some stairs. There were no injuries, but you felt Kappen was capable of anything and I knew he had an Austin 1100."
"I thought it was natural for men to hit women," Christine continues. "I thought all men were violent. He used to rape me every two weeks. It was against my will. I never wanted it. Joe would say, 'Come on, come on', and then he would insist on his conjugal rights."
Following Wheadon's tip, detectives from the murder team visited Kappen on October 13 1973, nearly a month after the murders; but he swiftly passed through the system. In his statement Kappen claimed to have returned from Neath Fair at around 9.30pm on the Saturday and spent the rest of the evening "looking after my canaries until about 10.45pm, when myself and my wife went to bed. I got up the next morning at 10.30am." Christine, sitting on the sofa beside him, had concurred. "I alibied him but I always did whenever the police came knocking. You learned to do it without thinking. 'On such and such a night he was with me, officer.' I couldn't see him doing that. I cannot imagine him doing that to a child. I never saw any signs of an unusual interest in young girls."
In fact, Kappen regularly pursued teenage girls. His job as a bouncer brought him into contact with the younger generation. "It was his thrill to go with younger girls even when he was 43," says Rees. "If he had a girl he paraded her around for show, to show his mates. In bed it was always regular sex, no violence, nothing out of the ordinary."
When he worked as a driver on local buses, Kappen would use his rest breaks on the village green at Llandarcy to try to chat up girls. "He was a sexual predator," says Bethell. "He always carried a weapon, a knife, and he had the ligature ready at Llandarcy. With him there is always predatory intent combined with arrogance. He was cocky, confident, not afraid to carry out crimes in his own back yard where the risk of being identified was always high."
Even in the first killing, Kappen made little attempt to hide Sandra's body. If he had carried it deeper into the culvert, instead of dumping it at the entrance, her corpse might not have been found for weeks. Kappen's record of assaults on women, all unknown to police at the time, began in the early 1960s. In 1964 he attacked a 15-year-old schoolgirl as they were walking together in the Sandfields estate. As they entered a half-built house, he threw her to the ground and jumped on her. But when the girl screamed he got up and ran away.
And there were other incidents. In February 1973, a man resembling Kappen, in an Austin, picked up two female hitchhikers near Neath. As they neared their drop-off point, he drove past and took them to an isolated road. One girl was in the front and the other in the back seat. The attacker stopped the car and told them, "I know you want it." He then grabbed the girl in the front seat and started pawing her breasts. Her companion reached forward to intervene, but he swung back his fist and punched her in the face. Both girls were screaming and tried to escape, but found the car doors would not open from the inside. Fortunately, the girl in the back had long nails and was able to grab the stub of the door lock and pull it up. The door opened and she pulled open the front passenger door from the outside. Woken by the commotion, the occupants of a nearby house turned on their lights and the attacker fled. The double attempted rape was never reported because one of the girls thought she'd get in trouble with her father, a churchwarden. The attacker was almost certainly Kappen. His next victim, Sandra Newton, would not escape alive.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/jan/18/weekend.kevintoolis
In 1973 the bodies of two 16-year-old girls were found dumped in South Wales. The friends had been raped and strangled on their way home from a disco. Less than a year later, the police trail had gone cold. It was not until a breakthrough in DNA fingerprinting some 30 years after the murders that detectives at last had a chance of finding the killer
Kevin Toolis
Sat 18 Jan 2003 00.50 GMT
It is September 1973, and the Top Rank nightclub in Swansea, South Wales, is packed. In the middle of the dance floor, bopping to Marc Bolan, are 16-year-old Geraldine Hughes and her best mate Pauline Floyd. Coloured spotlights, miniskirts, vodka and lime, loons, feather haircuts and crippling knee-high platform boots are "in".
Above the heads of the dancers, in the cinema upstairs, Roger Moore is playing James Bond in Live And Let Die. The cinema billboard blazes out light into the wet Swansea night. But soon it will be turned off by government order. Britain is in the throes of an energy crisis; a war in the Middle East sends oil prices soaring and the miners go on strike; coal stocks start to run down; a state of emergency is declared. Prime minister Ted Heath orders a three-day week. Across Britain, street lights, advertising signs and cinema billboards are shut down in a desperate attempt to stave off power cuts.
Personal computers, CDs, punk rock, the hole in the ozone layer, gay rights, mobile phones, microwave meals, DNA profiling, raves and Thatcherism are all yet to be invented. And other things are yet to be named.
No one in Swansea, or the world for that matter, has heard of the words "serial killer" or "sexual predator", even though there is just such a killer here tonight, hidden among the dancers, with his shoulder-length hair and sideburns, indistinguishable from all the other would-be male suitors.
Tonight he will kill again, twice. Perhaps he has already picked them out, bubbly Geraldine with her big laugh and white minidress, and quiet Pauline, just five foot tall, with her green nail varnish and finger rings.
The "Rank" is the top spot, the swankiest disco in South Wales, and draws a huge crowd from miles around. Pauline and Geraldine live seven miles away in the neighbouring villages of Llandarcy and Skewen. It is always awkward getting home. There are no buses at 1am when the disco finishes, and taxis are expensive. Few people have cars. Pauline and Geraldine work in a sewing factory and earn £16 a week; a taxi is four quid. Everyone hitchhikes.
It's spitting rain and the girls are sheltering at a bus stop a few hundred yards from the club in the direction of home. A passing driver, Philip O'Connor, sees a white car swerve to the side of the road and pick them up. As he sits at the next traffic light listening to Radio Luxembourg, the white car draws alongside. He glances over and sees both girls in the front seat chatting away to the driver. He catches a glimpse of bushy hair, a moustache, but most of the face is hidden behind the girls.
Geraldine and Pauline never make it home. At 10 the next morning, a pensioner walking in a wooded copse near Llandarcy stumbles on Pauline's body. She is lying face down with her black platform boots beside her. Someone has lashed a five foot rope around her neck several times and strangled her. Her clothing is heavily bloodstained; she has been battered about the head.
Geraldine's body is discovered 50 yards away, close to the main Jersey Marine Road, busy even at night, leading directly to the M4. She, too, has a head wound and has been strangled with a five foot rope from behind. Both girls are fully clothed, but postmortem examinations reveal they have been raped. Both were virgins. After the rapes, the killer allowed each girl to re-dress herself; their feet inside their tights are dirty from the earthy floor.
The copse is a shortcut from the main road to Llandarcy and Pauline's home, where both girls planned to spend the night. But how the girls ended up in that pitch-dark copse with a stranger, how the killer controlled two girls, will never be known. In the black-and white police crime scene photos, both girls look absurdly out of place, like broken mannequins dumped in a forest. In close-up, their faces, daubed with mud and debris from being pushed into the earth, are grotesquely aged by the agony of their violent death.
A huge police murder team, with more than 150 detectives, is swiftly assembled. It is the biggest murder inquiry in Welsh history.
Llandarcy lies in the centre of the heavily populated South Wales industrial belt. The landscape is dominated by steel plants, flaring oil refineries and deep-water docks. The main towns of Swansea, Port Talbot and Neath are just minutes away along the M4. From passing drivers police establish that a white car, soon identified as an Austin 1100, was parked at the entrance to the copse between 1.45am and 2.15am on that Sunday morning. It must be the killer's car. But no one saw the number plate.
There is a potential link to another murder. Three months earlier, 16-year-old hitchhiker Sandra Newton was found strangled, her body dumped close to a local disused colliery. She had been raped and choked to death with the hem of her chiffon skirt. Sandra was last seen walking home from a nightclub in the neighbouring village of Britton Ferry after a Saturday night out. There were reports of an Austin 1100 "going like the clappers" in the area at the time of the murder. The papers nickname the killer the "Saturday Night Strangler".
The police, led by chief superintendent Ray Allen, set up a murder room in Skewen police station. There are no computers. Instead, the murder team relies on a complex manual card index system and a "graticule" - a wall-sized white board divided into tiny squares in which individual inquiries or "actions" are listed and then crossed off when completed. Police print up a poster: "DANGER, THUMBING LIFTS HAS LED TO MURDER - DON'T".
"There were police, dogs, panda cars, going round all the time, everywhere. No one walked the streets. My mother would not let me out of her sight. It could have been the milkman, the postman," remembers Barbara Williams, a close friend of Pauline and Geraldine.
But soon the inquiry is drowning in the very paperwork it creates. The strongest lead is the white Austin 1100. In 1973, cars are registered in local taxation offices. Obtaining a list of Austin 1100 owners involves trawling through the records in each office. There are more than 11,000 white Austin 1100s. Each owner is visited, asked for a statement, and their alibi verified by a statement from someone else.
The inquiry team is divided about the Sandra Newton murder. Her married boyfriend confesses that they left the nightclub together and had a "quickie" in the back of an abandoned van. He says he then left Sandra at the roadside, walking home in the opposite direction. For the police, the boyfriend's adultery is awkward. In public they deny Sandra was sexually assaulted; the "quickie" is glossed over. The boyfriend doesn't have a licence, doesn't have a car and Sandra's body is found miles away. But there is still a lingering suspicion that it's him.
Chief superintendent Allen holds a press conference and appeals to the killer's relatives to turn him in. "We are pretty certain he is being shielded by someone; could be a woman, could be a relative or someone close to him. That Sunday morning, his shoes must have been muddy, his clothing could have been bloodstained. This man is sick and needs medical attention. He could kill again unless we can get him to a doctor. Let the police know about him before he kills again. We will look after him."
But no one turns him in. By mid-1974, the murder team is quietly wound down; the inquiry has run out of leads. The Saturday Night Strangler has got away.
On the third anniversary of the murders, Geraldine Hughes's mother Jean leads a protest march of 50 of her sewing factory workmates to 10 Downing Street. Under the blank eyes of the No 10 bobby, the group stand with their handmade banners: "BRING BACK HANGING!" Mrs Hughes poses for the photographers with her 9,000-signature petition. "I can't accept what happened to Geraldine. It has left me very bitter. If they ever catch the person responsible, they should hang him. I want him to feel a rope around his neck like the girls felt."
But Mrs Hughes's journey to London is futile. Britain's rulers, grappling with rebellious unions, industrial strife and economic meltdown, have other things on their mind. And besides, there is no one to hang. Back in Wales, the trail has gone cold.
Unsolved murders are never officially closed. When the Llandarcy murder inquiry was wound down, all of the boxes and boxes of statements, and much of the girls' clothing, was shipped to Sandfields police station in Port Talbot. It lay there for nearly 30 years; some of the boxes of statements got damp and turned into black fungal mush. The most valuable forensic material, the girls' underwear, was retained in dry storerooms at the Home Office's forensic science labs in Chepstow.
Over the decades, the case was reviewed and the odd suspect questioned, but it was more a formality than a serious investigative endeavour. Even the advent of DNA "fingerprinting" in the mid-1980s had no impact. Early DNA tests required a fresh sample the size of a 10 pence piece, blood or semen, to extract a DNA profile. Stains on a victim's clothing from a decade earlier were no use. As each year passed, the chances of catching the killer faded.
Then, in 1998, a new Low Copy Number DNA test was developed that could utilise just a tiny speck of DNA material. The girls' clothing, and swabs, were sent to a specialist research lab in Birmingham for testing. It was a protracted process. The girls' and the killer's DNA were jumbled up in the 25-year-old samples. After two years' work, the scientists could get only a partial profile of the killer's DNA from Geraldine. But the result from Pauline was unambiguous: a full genetic profile that could be expressed as a string of numbers. The police at last had a genetic fingerprint of the killer. But who was he?
The criminal National DNA Database (NDNAD) holds 1.7m profiles, but the Llandarcy killer wasn't one of them. If the police were going to catch him, they would have to go looking for him.
Operation Magnum, the reinvestigation of the Llandarcy murders, was officially opened in January 2000, 27 years after the killings. It wasn't so much a criminal investigation as an act of history. No previous unsolved British murder, probably no unsolved murder case in the world, has ever been successfully reinvestigated so long after the event.
The entire Magnum team consisted of detective chief inspector Paul Bethell, a gregarious hulk of a man, and two ageing detectives, both 30-year veterans nearing retirement, Phil Rees and Geraint Bale. Bethell reassembled the Llandarcy murder room in a run-down police station in the village of Pontardawe, close to the murder scenes, and set Rees and Bale to work. His plan was to DNA swab the most likely suspects and match them to the Llandarcy killer's profile. But he had a budget for just 500 swabs. The first task was to comb through every piece of paper and come up with a list of the top 500 suspects out of the 35,000 names in the files.
Sifting through the files, the team discovered a number of unsolved rapes in the Neath area. There was no DNA evidence because the women's clothing had been destroyed. But two of the rapes, carried out in the months prior to the murders, had a strong similarity to the Llandarcy killings because they involved the use of ropes.
The balaclaved rapist lay in wait for his victims, grabbing them from behind and then punching or threatening them into submission. "Don't scream or struggle, or I'll kill you." He bound their hands and asked: "Are you a virgin?" He then raped each woman vaginally and anally. He smelled strongly of tobacco, wore an anorak and had a moustache. At the end he would masturbate as his victim lay naked on the ground. "Don't open your eyes. I'm going to have a cigarette and think about whether I'm going to kill you or not," he told one victim. Was the unknown rapist and the Llandarcy murderer the same man? And if he was, could evidence from the rapes help them to catch the killer?
The detectives drew on another investigative tool that their 1973 colleagues didn't have: psychological profiling. The Llandarcy team called in Rupert Heritage, former chief of the behavioural science unit of Surrey police, to draw up a 14-point profile. The profile predicted that the killer would be white, aged late 20s to mid-30s, have a history of minor property crime, have come to the attention of the police as a juvenile at around 12, and was likely to live in the Neath area. He was also likely to have a history of assaults, and possibly animal cruelty. He was unskilled and probably had an incomplete family background, such as an absent father, and a troubled marriage. He would collect weapons and have solo sports interests.
Drawing on the profile, the Magnum team started whittling away their 35,000 names. Rees and Bale spent eight mind-numbing months locked away in the file room knowing that the smallest bureaucratic misfiling could mean losing the killer. "No one outside the team ever believed we would get a detection from this," says Rees. "It was like throwing a dice for two years. Perhaps he [the killer] was not in that room. Why could it not have been a travelling Scotsman, a Swede on a boat in Swansea docks that night who sailed away the next day?" says Bethell. But they got their 500 names, and Rees and Bale began trying to locate the men on the list. It was another logistical nightmare: 30 years was half a lifetime. People move, marry, emigrate and change their name. Streets are knocked down, redeveloped and rebuilt. People die.
They used the DVLA, the passport office, and tax and criminal records to find addresses all over, even as far away as New Zealand. After locating the nominal suspect, they had to persuade each man to volunteer his DNA. "We were looking for a particular tree in a forest. In order to find it, you had to cut down all the other trees. The beauty of DNA is that you can once and for all eliminate a suspect," says Bethell.
None of the 353 men swabbed over the following eight months refused - a refusal would of course have automatically triggered police suspicion - but many of them were not happy being questioned about 30-year-old sex murders.
"Selling double glazing must be easier than selling a DNA test. It usually took two hours. The easiest people to deal with were those with convictions. They just wanted it out the way. We ended up swabbing in barges, taxis and hotel rooms. The worst was always their sitting room in front of the wife," says Rees.
The DNA test results started coming back. It was never him.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jan/18/wales.kevintoolis
The hunt for the Saturday Night Strangler
Kevin Toolis' story of the unmasking of Geraldine Hughes and Pauline Floyd's murderer concludes.
Click here for part one
Kevin Toolis
Sat 18 Jan 2003 00.48 GMT
The 500 nominal suspects had been prioritised into five groups. The first 50 swabs were of witnesses, relatives, stepfathers, boyfriends, anyone who had featured prominently in the initial inquiry. After them came ordinary criminal suspects. Each swabbing operation, even if it failed, generated its own trail of paperwork. Typical was nominal suspect 200, Joseph Kappen, who lived on the Sandfields estate in Port Talbot. In August 2001, Rees went to the address and knocked on the door. Kappen's ex-wife, Christine Powell, was still living there; Kappen wasn't. He'd been dead for 12 years. Rees had to check her claim against the local death register and reallocate Kappen to the dead pool - nominals who awaited final elimination by crosschecking with family members' DNA: another tedious chore.
Two months later, the team had their first breakthrough. A DNA specialist, Dr Jonathan Whitaker, managed to extract a profile from swabs taken from Sandra's body. "It was a three-way mix," says Bethell. "Sandra, the boyfriend and an unknown individual. But the unknown matched the profile from the Llandarcy murders. It was the same man." For the first time, all three cases were definitively linked. Sandra's killer had dumped her body in a water culvert close to the disused Garth colliery, a culvert so remote and well hidden it could have been known only to locals. "I knew we'd get him then," says Rees. "We knew he was living locally. He was someone who must have been spoken to. And he had an 1100."
In October 2001, Whitaker, thinking laterally, came up with a novel way of unmasking the killer. "This case happened in 1973. The offender could have had children. Was it possible that there was a relative of the offender on the database?"
We inherit our DNA from our parents and pass on 50% of that DNA to our children. Because he had the killer's profile, Whitaker knew he also had 50% of the killer's children's DNA profile. Starting with all the profiles submitted to NDNAD by the South Wales police, Whitaker started searching for a version of the killer's profile. Like the suspect list, this was another huge process of elimination; only this time Whitaker sat at a computer screen and deleted thousands of names with a flick of a key. By eliminating non-related profiles at each stage of a 10-step process, Whitaker reduced the list from 22,000 possible suspects to just 100 names whose genetic profiles were closely related to the Llandarcy killer.
It was a unique line of investigation. "We were looking for a father and getting to him by his son," says Whitaker.
One of those hundred names, Paul Kappen, a car thief, jumped off the page. Paul Kappen was only seven when the Llandarcy killings took place but two Kappens in the files was just too much of a coincidence. Joseph Kappen, 12 years dead, was now the number one suspect.
Rees and Bale returned to Sandfields and per-suaded Christine and her daughter Deborah to volunteer DNA samples. By subtracting Powell's DNA from her son's and daughter's, the forensic scientists would be able to recreate most of Joseph Kappen's DNA. It took two weeks for the results to be processed. "I was sitting at my desk in the Pontardawe murder room when the call came through from the forensic scientist, Colin Dark," says Bethell. "He was going on about a partial match and the DNA banding. And I said, 'What are you telling me?' He said, 'I think you've got your man.' It was a strange feeling, very emotional. I don't get excited or overwhelmed, not after all these years. But I really did get a lump in my throat."
What the forensic scientists had obtained was a three-quarters profile of Kappen that was identical to that of the Llandarcy killer. Statistically, it was him. But murder inquiries, even cold ones, are not about statistics. "I needed to be able to tell the victims' families, 'The man in the grave is the man who killed your daughters.' He's a serial killer. I wanted to be **** sure that he was in that grave," says Bethell.
On Christmas Eve 2001, Bethell made an application to home secretary David Blunkett to exhume his suspect. In death, Kappen was now making history. He was the first serial killer ever to be pulled from the grave to ascertain his guilt.
Kappen was buried in Goytre Cemetery on the outskirts of Port Talbot. The graves are perched on a steep Welsh hillside; down the valley, in the distance, you can just make out the sea. Kappen shared a family grave with his stepfather Clemente Proietti and grandfather Joseph Herbert. Kappen's coffin was sandwiched in the middle. All three coffins would have to be dug up with no guarantee there'd be any viable DNA to collect. It took five months for the exhumation permission to come through.
Above ground, the manhunt intensified. "There were hundreds of questions we wanted answered. Where did he kill Sandra? Did he know the girls? Had he carried out other attacks? How did he get away with it? Who was he?" says Rees. He and Bale interviewed anyone and everyone who had associated with Kappen. Kappen's name was given out to the local newspapers. Unknown victims came forward.
It was a retired Port Talbot detective, Elwyn Wheadon, who had given Kappen's name to the original murder team. "Kappen was a bouncer in nightclubs," says Wheadon. He was a man of violent disposition, a Fagin-like character who sought out boys and girls to commit crimes on his behalf. I first met him at a youth club where he threw a boy down some stairs. There were no injuries, but you felt Kappen was capable of anything and I knew he had an Austin 1100."